


Celestial Mechanics

by UnabashedBird



Series: King and Lionheart [2]
Category: RWBY
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Pre-Canon, Team STRQ Era (RWBY)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-11
Updated: 2021-03-11
Packaged: 2021-03-17 23:42:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29974086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UnabashedBird/pseuds/UnabashedBird
Summary: Qrow was orbital. He needed something to revolve his life around, or else he just completely fell apart.
Relationships: Qrow Branwen & Raven Branwen, Qrow Branwen & Summer Rose, Qrow Branwen & Taiyang Xiao Long, Qrow Branwen/Ozpin
Series: King and Lionheart [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2151699
Comments: 2
Kudos: 18





	Celestial Mechanics

At some point, Qrow started thinking of gravity as one of the defining forces of his life.

Not because of the bird thing, either. Well, not just that.

And mostly not literal gravity either, though again, the bird thing.

It's more like . . . Qrow was orbital. He needed something to revolve his life around, or else he just completely fell apart.

And gods knew he did enough of that anyway.

Growing up, it was Raven. They orbited each other, really. Twin planets pulling each other through life in the Branwen tribe. To separate was unthinkable.

(Until it wasn't, but that was much later, and he still didn't understand it, still wasn't sure he'll ever fully heal from it, was still haunted by the question: does she hurt as much as he does at the jagged edges of their broken relationship?)

The first big gravitational shift came the day of their Beacon initiation. He and Raven knew how to find each other in unfamiliar territory, so partnering up should have been easy. At the time he thought it was his bad luck, though it didn't take long for him to wonder. Whatever the reason, the first pair of eyes he met in the forest were silver, not red.

"Move along," Raven said, striding out of the trees, imperious as always. "My brother and I are partners."

The girl in the cape cocked her head, and he wasn't sure if the confusion was real or feigned. "Professor Ozpin said we partner with the first person we make eye contact with. I get wanting to be together, but rules are rules." And she smiled, and it was a charming, disarming thing, but Qrow thought there might be an edge in there somewhere.

Raven scoffed. "Maybe where you come from--"

"Also!" the girl continued brightly, "Professor Ozpin did say we would be monitored throughout the initiation. I don't think it looks good for any of us to blatantly violate one of the few specific guidelines he gave us, do you?"

Qrow still wasn't sure what made him say it, other than the gleam in Raven's eye suggesting she was considering the kinds of "accidents" that could happen during Grimm attacks, and his own sense that murder on the first day wouldn't be a great start to this whole Academy business.

"We're here to _learn_ , Raven. That doesn't have to just mean the teachers, right?"

She glared at him, and he raised an eyebrow. _Just drop it, it's not worth it_ he tried to broadcast. Raven rolled her eyes. "Fine." And she stormed off, probably hoping she'd find a Grimm on which to take out her ire.

"So, yeah, that happened," said his new partner. "Summer," she added, and held out her hand to him.

"Qrow," he replied, shaking her hand.

"Your sister . . . "

"Is an acquired taste."

Sumer giggled, and beckoned him after her, further into the forest.

He followed, and gravity shifted.

Not just for him, either. Once Raven got over being pissed at Summer (and Qrow, which was totally uncalled for but not exactly unexpected), she too was drawn in, and they became a new star system: planets Qrow, Raven, and Tai, orbiting the Summer sun.

And oh, how they wheeled and spun and danced through the Beacon galaxy, shining bright and teeming with life.

Not even noticing they were slowly being drawn towards a center they didn't yet know existed.

When he was feeling melancholy (which was often, though he knew how to hide it), Ozpin sometimes thought of Ozma as a great black hole, devouring each life unfortunate enough to come near.

His predecessor tried to tell him, before they fully merged. Tried to prepare him for the fact that, no matter how hard he clung to _himself_ , the ocean of memories would change him.

_What are we, really, but the sum of our remembrances?_

It wasn't that he didn't believe in the cause--a world of peace and equality, Salem defeated--it was that he still wanted to be _him_.

But _he_ was so small compared to that great black hole, and some days he was sure it was eating him alive. So he found things that were _his_ and clung to them with all his might, his only way of fighting the pull. He drank hot chocolate, not coffee. He baked cookies and shared them freely. He had a penchant for bending the rules, especially when doing so kept promising students from getting in a little _too_ much trouble. He loved fairy tales, he had _always_ loved fairy tales, had been taking a literature class as an elective at his combat school just to learn more about them when he awoke one morning with a voice in his head.

And he would choose his own allies.

Oh, there were the other Academy heads, of course. And they had their own networks, their trusted few who knew enough to be useful. That was all well and good, but it belonged to Ozma and the mission, not to him.

Ozpin was more than a little wary that there should be such a perfect team of recruits entering Beacon his very first year as headmaster. But Salem didn't enlist silver-eyed warriors--he had memories of lifetimes where she'd tried, and always they refused her, always they knew her as their natural foe. And though the Branwen twins were most assuredly up to _something_ , at least at first, he'd been able to ascertain that their tribe were merely bandits, and not some worrying new strategy of Salem's. And as for Taiyang Xiao Long, Ozpin didn't think he'd ever encountered a more forcefully _wholesome_ individual in his life, penchant for disruptive pranks notwithstanding.

And, well. He _liked_ Team STRQ: kind, principled Summer; laughing, boisterous Taiyang; cunning, ambitious Raven; stubborn, loyal Qrow. After a somewhat rocky start, they had clearly decided that truly being a team would be more interesting than not, and suddenly they were unstoppable, excelling in class, combat, and troublemaking.

They made Ozpin feel his own youth, a separate thing from the wisdom of Ozma's ages. _He_ was young, and _he_ thought many of STRQ's antics hilarious, even as his position required him to suppress his smile and act the disciplinarian.

He rather thought they saw through the act, which might explain why they never seemed to resent him for it.

And so, with no small amount of well-hidden guilt and shame over upended worldviews and the additional risks to which he was exposing them, he told team STRQ of his larger mission and the role he hoped they would play in it, and watched in wonder as they flung themselves willingly into his orbit.

In hindsight, Ozpin felt as inevitable as the other gravitational forces of Qrow's life, even though Oz always insisted that the true strength of those bonds came from choice.

Qrow, though, he was inclined to think that as long as he was himself and Oz was Oz, there was no way for things to be otherwise.

First, the enigma of the _very_ young headmaster who threw students off a cliff on their first day and was more likely to offer cookies than punishments when rules got broken, and did it all with a generic sort of pleasantness and a not-so-generic twinkle in his eye. (If you were looking for it, which Qrow was, because no one was _that_ unruffled all the time, not if he had anything to do with it.) Both Project Spy For the Tribe and Qrow's own curiosity demanded extensive investigation. Those things, combined with the stupid, embarrassing crush he developed early on, led to a lot of excuses to just happen to run into Ozpin and bug him about whatever seemed plausible at the time.

And Ozpin hadn't seemed to mind. Seemed . . . pleased, maybe. Pleased definitely, Qrow had eventually learned, which made the memories of some of his more flimsy excuses for going up to Oz's office feel slightly less cringeworthy. But only slightly.

Fourth year was STRQ's Introduction to Saving the World, and by then Qrow had ditched all loyalty to the Branwen tribe--not that he'd had much to begin with, it was just that Raven did and where Raven went so went he--in favor of being the kind of huntsman in Summer's books and Oz's fairy tales. The kind who threw themselves at the darkness and made it retreat. Sure, Qrow hadn't thought he'd be doing it on such a large scale, but he trusted Summer and Oz and followed where they led.

Especially after he convinced Raven that, since they were all going in on Secretly Saving the World together, they should come clean about why they'd originally come to Beacon. Clear the air. She hadn't liked the idea, but she hadn't stopped him, either. At the time he assumed that she just didn't consider it anyone else's business.

Later, he'd realize it was one of the early signs.

So he told Tai and Summer, and they were horrified and pissed, but mostly at the tribe and only a little at Qrow and Raven, and it only took part of a day before Tai decided "thanks for not murdering me in my sleep after [insert one of his hundreds of pranks]" was an excellent joke.

Ozpin, though. Oz just raised his eyebrows, _smiled_ , asked if they'd like to use their skills for him instead, _and gave them wings_.

Acceptance, trust, a noble mission, _wings_. Of course Qrow was his, irrevocably and forever.

Two years later, Qrow was profoundly grateful for the strength of Ozpin and Summer's combined gravity, and the bright new star of baby Yang, _holy shit he was an uncle and she was tiny and perfect and he would do anything for her including never go near her to save her from his Semblance if it came down to it how was it possible to_ feel _this much about someone who mostly just cried and ate and pooped and slept_?

Because even with all that anchoring him to his life as a huntsman and agent, when Raven asked him to go with her--no, when Raven _assumed_ he would go with her without her even having to ask--she was almost right.

Sure, the tribe had always been horrible to him, and he never completely suppressed the twinge of his conscience at the role he played in their attacks back in the day.

But it was Raven. His sister, his protector, his _family_. They'd always followed each other, always had each other's backs.

Turned out, they had pretty different ideas of what family meant.

Which was confusing as all hell, actually, since _she_ was the one who had a kid with Tai, yet somehow Qrow was the one yelling about how Summer and Tai _and Yang_ were their family, a better family than the tribe had ever been.

(He knew better than to mention Oz. He'd always known that he and Raven viewed that work differently, and gods, if she wouldn't stay for _her daughter_ , there was definitely no point in rehashing why Oz was worth following.)

And still, somehow, Raven's face mirrored the confusion and hurt he couldn't keep from his own as they argued, because as sure as he'd been that she would stay, she was sure he'd go. That it would be Raven and Qrow against the world, only this time they were finally old enough and skilled enough to carve whatever place they wanted, instead of taking what they were given.

She hadn't realized that Qrow had already found his place, any more than he'd realized she was still looking for hers.

Incandescent with rage as he was, it didn't change the fact that Raven took a piece of his heart with her when she left, and it _hurt_. It hurt to lose the stability of her there-ness, of their twinned orbit. He was off balance, the remains of Team STRQ was off balance, most of his life a mad, upended whirl where none of the old grooves and pathways worked quite right.

The thing that didn't really change was Oz and the work Qrow did for him. Qrow had already been scouting mostly solo for nearly a year because of Raven's pregnancy and then baby Yang doing what babies did and taking up most of her parents' time and energy; if he did have a partner it was Summer, but she usually had her own missions. He just took shorter breaks between missions, and spent more of those breaks at Beacon than Patch.

There was only so much he could take of the gaping emptiness where Raven should've been when he visited Tai and Summer and Yang, even if Raven in anything like proximity to domesticity had always been strange. It had been _their_ strange. Or so he'd thought.

And Oz . . . Oz let him stick around and make a nuisance of himself, and didn't call him on his blatant avoidance tactics. He let Qrow sit on his desk and drink his hot chocolate and eat his food and distract him from his work. He listened when Qrow got drunk enough to talk about Raven, and afterwards insisted that Qrow crash on his couch instead of risking flying back to his tiny apartment in Vale in his inebriated state.

Six months after Raven's departure and Summer decided she'd had enough of Qrow's avoidant coping mechanisms and read him the riot act of the ages, letting him have it both for not letting her and Tai help him and for not helping them, "because that's what it means to be a team, and I'll be damned if I let shitty Branwen coping mechanisms screw that up for us."

Harsh but true, so he made himself go back to spending most of his off-time in Patch, although he still refused to spend the night until Yang was a year old _because you're not the only one who can do research_ Summer _and no way was he risking his Semblance causing SIDS thank you_ very _much_. It was hard at first, the last six months hanging heavy between the three of them, but they slowly found a new rhythm, a new orbital mechanics: Tai, Yang, and Summer at the center, stable and stabilizing, with Qrow whirling around them, grounded by them, stabilizing them in turn if Summer was to be believed.

He wished it didn't come at the expense of large chunks of time with Oz, but it was a compromise he could live with.

Ozpin surely had more important things to do anyway.

Ozpin was happy for Qrow, he _was_. It was better for his roost of return to be his family in Patch; they provided more normality and stability than Ozpin ever could, and he wanted those things for Qrow.

Thinking about how much he missed him was completely selfish.

Besides, it wasn't as if they never saw each other. Qrow still lingered after mission debriefings, and if it was evening he wouldn't leave at all, staying to talk about everything and nothing and always letting Ozpin persuade him to sleep on Ozpin's couch and share breakfast in the morning. Ozpin knew Qrow was deadly serious about not spending the night in the same house as Yang while she was young enough for SIDS to be a possibility, and he was too grateful to question Qrow's excuse of not wanting to risk waking "the little hellion" or otherwise disrupt Tai and Summer's evenings once Yang passed her first birthday.

Somehow, Qrow Branwen of all people had become Ozpin's friend, and he cherished every moment. When it was just the two of them he could let his guard down in ways he couldn't with anyone else in his life--not completely, never completely, but every little bit helped. Qrow's utter lack of patience for politics and power-brokering freed him to speak candidly about some of the people he had to deal with, and then listen to Qrow call them delightfully colorful names and express his desire to do things like drop-kick them off buildings. It was cathartic and endearing and completely inappropriate, and Ozpin enjoyed it immensely. Qrow was also always eager to hear about any students, individually or as teams, who might live up to STRQ's troublemaking legacy; he preened like his namesake when Ozpin told him that STRQ and their antics were still campus legends, and Ozpin shamelessly made fun of him for it.

And he knew Qrow was happier since reconnecting with Tai and Summer, and that more than anything was worth having to share him. It meant he got to see things like the tender wonderment in Qrow's face when, after Ruby's birth, he told Ozpin that he was an uncle again; the way he said it, Ozpin knew Tai and Summer must've had to remind him that it wasn't biology that made them family.

"People forget," Ozpin had said, "that the phrase 'blood is thicker than water' is actually an abbreviation, and its meaning is the opposite of what people usually intend when they use the expression. The original, you see, is 'the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.' The bonds we choose are stronger than those created by the happenstance of birth."

Qrow had been quiet and stared into the middle distance, and Ozpin had pretended not to see the moisture in his eyes while also resisting the urge to reach out and brush it away. "Yeah," Qrow had finally said, "that sounds about right."

Ozpin wished with all his might that things could've continued that way indefinitely: Qrow his brilliant field agent, returning to him not just with important information on Salem's movements but amusing stories about his own exploits and those of his family in Patch; the family to which he would then return until either Ozpin or some necessity of his own gave him another mission.

Raven's departure was like a thief in the night: precious things taken, leaving behind the knowledge that home was not as secure a thing as once thought. Traumatic, but with a relatively clear path to recovery and normality.

When Summer disappeared, it was a bomb detonating the beating heart of their lives.

Ozpin could only watch helplessly as Qrow went out, over and over, scouring for any sign and finding none.

Could do nothing but bear witness to Qrow's dead eyes and slurred speech as, very late one night, he told Ozpin that he'd finally made the call: he wasn't going to look any more, because if there was anything to find he would have by now.

Qrow broke down right there on Ozpin's couch, and all Ozpin had to offer was a hand on his shoulder and an "I'm sorry" said through his own tears.

Qrow's life went supernova when Summer disappeared, and after he was forced to accept that she was dead, Oz and his nieces were all that stopped him from vanishing into the black hole left by her absence, never to return.

They anchored him, held him back from the brink. As he tried to figure out how best to help Tai and the girls, he kept thinking, over and over, _I shouldn't be the one doing this, Summer's the one who knows how to do this_ and then he'd have to drink or go see Oz or both just to resettle himself in his skin.

Then came the day he slept through his alarm, and Tai went to work anyway because he wasn't all the way there and assumed Qrow would be along any minute, and then Yang and Ruby went into the woods and if Qrow had arrived even 30 seconds after he did they would've . . .

He and Tai got into a knock-down drag-out fight over that one, pretending their terror was rage and turning it on the relatively safe target of each other; once they cooled off they both immediately set to blaming themselves instead of each other, and it would've been funny if the stakes of the whole thing had been any lower.

Regardless, they both concluded that Qrow probably shouldn't be Tai's main source of childcare any more--too many ways Qrow's Semblance and Yang's everything could conspire to catastrophic effect. Unfortunately, money was an issue, so Qrow started taking as many missions as he could, starting a new one as soon as each was complete, because _this_ at least he could do right. He was a damn good huntsman, and he could take the best-paying contracts he could get, and when those weren't available he could make up for it by cranking through a bunch of low-paying ones, and then send most of the money back to Patch. That way Tai could afford their old daycare, and he and the girls could focus on healing and navigating their new normal.

And maybe if Qrow kept moving long enough, he'd outrun the howling void.

Ozpin hardly ever saw Qrow after the near miss with the girls--he only came back to Beacon if there was a report he needed to deliver in person. He looked worse every time Ozpin saw him: thinner, darker shadows beneath his eyes, only as mentally present as the situation required.

It was obvious just from looking at him that Qrow's nonstop field work wasn't just about financially assisting his family--indeed, Ozpin had done a little research and was relatively certain Qrow could have taken fewer missions while still contributing more than enough to keep Tai and his nieces comfortable. Ozpin just hoped it would run its course soon; like Qrow, his reasons for that were mixed: he was concerned for Qrow's well-being, as both a friend and spymaster, but he also, so very selfishly, desperately missed the other man and the old easiness of their time together.

He missed being the one Qrow came back to, inevitable as gravity forcing all birds to land eventually, comfortable as a familiar roost.

He wanted . . . but that didn't matter.

What mattered was the call he got from a hospital on Sanus' eastern coast, letting him know that Qrow as there and in bad shape, some combination of exhaustion, recklessness, and his Semblance having finally caught up with him.

What mattered was that it never occurred to Ozpin to do anything other than take the first airship he could out to where Qrow was.

Natural as breathing, inescapable as gravity.

Even though he'd made Ozpin his emergency contact after Summer died, Qrow didn't expect to wake up in a hospital to Oz sitting next to him.

Didn't expect the raw emotion on Oz's face, or the argument that somehow led to confessions he never would have believed possible.

It was only as he felt the full force of the effect Oz had always had on him, felt it pulling him back to light and hope, that Qrow realized he'd expected to be dragged all the way into the dark eventually--it was just a matter of when. But with Oz there, offering Qrow more than he could ever have dared hope for, it was the best possible non-choice.

Qrow was orbital, and somehow he'd never realized until that moment that Oz had been the most consistent person in his life since the day they'd met. And now he was offering so much more than a place and a purpose--was offering _himself_ , in ways Qrow thought were only possible in his fantasies.

Qrow's answer could only ever be _yes_.

Ozpin's bouts of melancholy were fewer and farther between after the understanding he and Qrow reached at the hospital.

Truthfully, he was happier than he'd ever been in this lifetime. _He_ was happy, just him, for the mundane, everyday reason of learning his romantic feelings were requited, and a corner of his life could be filled with the extraordinarily ordinary joys and sorrows, ups and downs of a relationship.

It would have been enough, if he was able to bring Qrow back from the dreadful brink and convince him to return to something akin to their old pattern.

It would have been enough to be the center of Qrow's professional, missional orbit, and know he was safe and relatively happy in Patch when he wasn't working at a reasonable rate.

Somehow, miraculously, Ozpin got to have more. Got to zoom in from celestial to terrestrial gravitation. Got to be the nest to which Qrow returned, to cuddle him in bed instead of contenting himself with tucking a blanket over him before leaving him on the couch.

Gravity was inexorable, but when it was drawing his beloved home, he was more than all right with that.

**Author's Note:**

> This was one of those fics that started as a concept I wanted to flesh out and then kinda got away from me. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> Also, at some point I do plan to write a more detailed version of getting together bit at the end; it just didn't fit with this fic's more zoomed-out lens.
> 
> Anyway, thanks for reading!


End file.
